Guriho and Otonyo weren’t planning any new dramatic actions. They said everyone should lie low for a while and focus on growing the CFM’s numbers. But Bero and Tadino still went out occasionally with spray paint and crowbars and did what they could to damage clan businesses, always moving around between neighborhoods and without any pattern. They were like fish biting a whale, but that was how it had always been for Bero. He was used to being on the bottom. Paint could be cleaned off and windows repaired, but it still cost the clans every time. More people would see that Green Bones could be defied, even by small fish.
Guriho stood up at the front of the room with a clipboard and began speaking into a microphone. Every time Bero saw the man, he thought of a goat in a sweater. The mixed-blood Oortokon had small eyes and a long, coarse beard. He breathed heavily and paced as he spoke, and he always seemed vaguely unkempt. But he was an energetic speaker. “Jade is said to be a gift from Heaven, but it’s a curse from hell and its demons. All over the world, people use it for evil. Here in Kekon, everyone lives under the tyranny of the Green Bones. In Shotar, barukan gang members wear jade while committing extortion, murder, and rape. The Espenian military’s jade-wearing soldiers turned Oortoko into a war-torn wasteland.” Guriho shouted, “And who controls jade? Who sits at the top of this pyramid of violence and corruption? The Green Bone clans of Kekon.”
The crowd muttered its angry agreement and people stomped the floor in applause. The woman next to Bero was sitting forward at the edge of the bench, listening intently. She was pretty. Very pretty. Too young and pretty for a crowd like this. She had short, sexy hair and milky skin and slightly parted full lips.
“Hey, what’s your name?” Bero asked her.
She turned to him, her eyebrows rising with suspicion and curiosity. It was a reaction Bero was accustomed to receiving from women, on account of his youth and his crooked face, which made him ugly but also suggested there was something interesting about him, that he might’ve been deformed in a duel or battle.
The girl with the scarf hesitated. “Ema,” she said.
Bero would like to believe she was flirting with him by giving him a diminutive personal name and not her family name, but he knew it was only because no one at these meetings wanted to identify themselves. The crowd was an unlikely assortment of people from disreputable backgrounds and those with radical agendas—“new green” who wore jade illegally, ex-barukan, shine addicts, students, and political extremists such as militant Abukei rights activists, anti-dueling proponents, and anarchists. There was even, Bero noticed with surprise, a foreigner sitting near the back of the room. Many of these people would hate each other if they didn’t hate the clans more.
“I’m Bero,” Bero said to the woman, even though she hadn’t asked for his name in return. She’d gone back to listening to Guriho, so he nudged her and added, “I used to have jade myself, you know. A lot of it. I always had to be on the run from Green Bones. The bastards nearly killed me, more than once. They’re the reason my face is like this. I’m lucky to be alive.” He could tell from her brief, irritated glance that she didn’t believe him. “It’s true. Let’s go for a drink later and I’ll tell you.”
Guriho glared in the direction of the whispering and Bero fell grudgingly silent. Guriho held up one of the pamphlets that were being passed around. “The Manifesto of the Clanless Future Movement,” he declared, and cleared his throat before beginning to read in a solemn and self-important timbre. “In the eternal fight for a more just and equal society free from the predations of the powerful against the weak, the goal of our noble struggle is the liberation of the world from the destructive influence of jade and the end of clannism.”
“That sounds very good, philosophically,” interrupted a gruff, accented voice, speaking above the rest, “but what can you actually do against the clans?” Everyone turned. It was the foreigner in the room who’d asked the question. He was a short, muscular man, with a large nose, hooded eyes beneath a heavy brow, and curly hair the color of rust. Despite being out of place in the gathering, he emanated a certain physicality and intensity of gaze that Kekonese people who are accustomed to Green Bones recognize as the sign of a formidable man, a man who can fight. The way he addressed Guriho was not aggressive, but there was challenge in his tone.
“If you listened before asking questions, you’d find out, ey?” Guriho said with a frown. “The clans might be powerful, but they can’t exist without the support of the people. The politicians, the Lantern Men, every person who pauses to salute a Green Bone on the street—they all feed the system. We must disrupt the system! We’ll start by creating a groundswell of support by opening people’s eyes—”